On Mon, Feb 16, 2026 at 09:16:33PM +0100, Preuße, Hilmar wrote: > Am 16.02.2026 um 09:35 schrieb Sune Vuorela: > > Hi Sune, > > > Given the license it is in non-free, it might only be conditionally > > distributable, and one of those conditions could be limiting the > > architectures for building. > > Or just limit automatic rebuilding. > > > > In my case I think about context-nonfree, which is CC_BY-NC-ND_2.5. I guess > this license is nonfree, b/c the modification of the licensed material is > not allowed. However during build process, which just copy some files, hence > I would guess this should not be an issue.
There are many packages in the non-free section that are similar - the reasons that make them non-free do not make them unfit for processing on the Debian infrastructure auto-build hosts and then including them in the archive. This is exactly the reason why the devref section mentioned above exists - if a specific package falls into this category, then: - the maintainer recognizes that the package is fit to be auto-built - the maintainer notes that by adding the source control field - the maintainer asks the buildd team about their opinion - the buildd team review the package and maybe agree ...and the package is then passed to the autobuilders and included in the non-free section of the archive. However, there are many different versions of non-free licenses that may make it impossible for a package to be built automatically; the classic example is a license that requires manual action to accept it. If a package is licensed that way, then, depending on the other terms of the license, it may be a violation to have the autobuilders automatically fetch the source from another host, unpack it, build it, and hand it off to yet another host for automated redistribution. However, again depending on the exact terms of the license, it may be possible for the Debian maintainer to build the package on their own machine and then upload the resulting binary packages to the non-free section of the archive. And this is just one possible reason; there are many other different stipulations in various licenses that disallow autobuilding. IMHO the "don't do this by default, only do it after manual checking" position is quite reasonable. G'luck, Peter -- Peter Pentchev [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] PGP key: https://www.ringlet.net/roam/roam.key.asc Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13
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